Images surreal and all too real

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Wardrobe malfunction ... Samantha Everton's computer-manipulated self-portrait, one of the winners of this year's Head On competition.

Reflections on society reveal our humanity, writes Robert
McFarlane.

This is a full week for documentary and portrait photography in
Sydney, with no fewer than five galleries exploring the camera as
social witness.

The Sandra Byron Gallery is displaying a compact survey of the
work of Jeff Carter. As a veteran photojournalist documenting
Australian life in city and country, Carter has almost assumed the
mantle of folk artist - photographing, as his letterhead famously
states, "the poor and unknown".

For more than a half century this former carnival worker, boxer
and navvy has turned his camera toward the many faces of Australia
- from impoverished rural workers to itinerant stockmen and
suburban city dwellers. The cover photograph of his latest book,
Retrospective, shows Carter at his best, displaying his
unforgettable 1958 photograph of Mavis Kerr, with new baby and
drover husband, in an Australian nativity scene of restrained,
unsentimental humanity.

Carter evades any claimed artistry for his vision, but time
spent with his photographs reveals a consistent, often moving
humanity, expressed with rigorous visual economy. Photographs on
view - from a spherically proportioned, sleeping Marree stockman in
1964 - to the succinct Tobacco Road in 1953 - evoke the
rituals and travails of bush life.

Next door to the Sandra Byron Gallery, Stills South has a
display of large, mostly colour works by Narelle Autio and Trent
Parke that shows, convincingly, how complementary their remarkable
visions have become.

At the Australian Centre for Photography, Stephen Dupont and
Paul Blackmore share the gallery with very different approaches to
portraying life in Papua New Guinea. Readers may remember
Blackmore's vigorous black-and-white reportage of voodoo water
rites in Haiti, displayed recently at the Stills Gallery.

This time Blackmore employs an almost pastel sense of colour in
a series of gentle observations of life's incongruities in our
nearest northern neighbour. In one image (which I felt could have
leaned even further toward the surreal), tribal "mud men" wearing
ceremonial masks were photographed amid soft furnishings in a
tourist hotel.

Nearby, Blackmore's picture of a line of pink and blue
children's coffins led me toward his emotional image of a woman
standing in the PNG landscape, desolate with worry. She was, said
Blackmore, a woman dedicated to saving lives among the often
vulnerable younger members of society.

Dupont's images are in complete contrast to the almost-delicate
observational quality expressed by Blackmore. In large, beautifully
printed images, some metres deep, Dupont presents formally
contained but vigorous portraits of the raskols of Papua New
Guinea, the outlaws armed with handmade pistols who are a daunting
part of daily life in Port Moresby and other PNG communities.

These portraits have an almost 19th-century complicity with the
camera, and Dupont illuminates their fragile mortality with
surprising tenderness. There are also reminders of Bruce Davidson's
formalist coverage of East 100th Street's minority communities in
late 1960s New York.

At the Mori Gallery several of Australia's leading photo-
journalists have joined artistic forces to raise money for the
still-ravaged areas of Asia affected by the recent tsunami. Many of
these photographs reduce the visitor to silence - as much for the
sheer scale of the disaster as the prospect of seeing human beings
reduced to ghastly debris. Several photographers stood out for
their oblique visual approach to the tragedy.

This newspaper's Mike Bowers, struck by the enormity of the
event, simply rotated his camera in an almost 360-degree arc.
Later, with computer software, Bowers stitched his photographs into
a fractured panorama of the destruction he had observed. Dean
Sewell's image of a fishing boat thrown kilometres inland and
resting in a flattened debris-strewn street, added a surreal
dimension to the viewing experience at the Mori Gallery.

Stephen Dupont and Nick Moir each displayed explicit, unblinking
portrayals of humanity reduced to fragments of flesh and bone. The
Herald's Tamara Dean, however, found surprising tenderness
amid survivors of the tsunami's destructive path. With income from
print sales at Mori Gallery going directly to agencies working in
the most affected areas, this exhibition should not be missed.

Head On is in its second year as an alternative
photographic portrait competition and the current display, at
Michael Nagy Fine Art, reveals much of the popular grammar of
contemporary fine art photography. It is a sign of these diverse
times that the three winners - Anthony Browell, Stephen Dupont and
Samantha Everton - produced, respectively, a pin-hole camera nude,
a classic documentary portrait and a surreal, computer- manipulated
self-portrait. (In the spirit of full disclosure, I should inform
readers that I was one of three judges for Head On, the
others being the competition founder, Moshe Rosenzveig,and the
photographer Greg Weight).

Darlinghurst's tiny Disc Gallery continues to show documentary
photography with Lost and Found, a series of images by Yie
Lim of Vietnam. These are intermittently touching, with the
standout image showing a radiant young Vietnamese woman assisting
her blind father. Lim also has a definite talent for the rendering
of street scenes as social tableaux. I would, however, like to have
seen Lim's images with a more personalised print-making signature,
using perhaps, dare I suggest, classic fibre-based prints made in a
traditional darkroom.

Two smaller galleries make interesting contributions this month:
Gallery Xposure at Rozelle has four photographers exploring very
different techniques. Richard Tabaka creates a strong sense of the
anthropomorphic in his sculptural rendering of stone, while Elaine
Lee successfully uses her humble plastic Holga camera for a series
of colour multiple exposures that evoke faint echoes of the US
painter Lyonel Feininger.

Jamie Redmond's warm, toned and well-made gum bichromate prints
suggest that old photographic processes never die, they just find
new, younger audiences. Philip Coggan's black-and-white coverage of
a shooting range in Asia much patronised by children produces a
chilling charade of juvenile aggression. There needs, however, to
be more pictures showing why the children seek out the range, and
something of the life to which they return afterwards.

Finally, Blender Gallery is showing nocturnal colour photographs
by Kathryn Thomas that claim to "investigate the gap between
imagination and reality and the unconscious". There is, however,
little present in the photographs capable of supporting this
weighty concept. Only two photographs emerge with any mystery - a
doorway leading into a building apparently made of sequins and a
Rapunzel-like, enclosed stone balcony, somewhere in France. Visual
ambitions as substantial as Thomas's deserve deeper thought and
more coherent action.